Campaigns will keep tabs at Ohio polls

When you enter the polling place on Election Day in Ohio, there might be many eyes watching you besides those of elections officials.

When you enter the polling place on Election Day in Ohio, there might be many eyes watching you besides those of elections officials.

• The campaign of Republican Mitt Romney plans to station Election Day Task Force members to record the name of every voter who walks through the door and feed it to a "national command center" database in Boston as part of an unprecedented high-tech get-out-the-vote effort.

• The campaign of President Barack Obama is deploying observers, many of them attorneys, to watch over polling places statewide.

• Conservative organizations such as Texas-based True The Vote already have signed up volunteers to watch for election fraud and "actively protect the rights of legitimate voters." And an affiliated group, the Voter Integrity Project, is working to train more than 200 poll workers in Hamilton County "to show you what your secretary of state might not show you."

• The liberal Ohio Unity Coalition is seeking observers to "fight back against those who want to take us back to the days of poll taxes, literacy tests and Jim Crow laws."

Aaron Ockerman, executive director of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, said it's good that people can watch the elections work. But there can be too much of a good thing, and he worries about precincts crowded with onlookers.

"At a certain point, even well-behaved observers are going to get in the way," he said.

Secretary of State Jon Husted said the election system already has Democrats and Republicans working at the polls to ensure the process runs according to the law.

If observers cross the line by taking an active, participatory role, they will be asked to leave, he said. But he welcomes the transparency.

"It has the ability to build confidence in the system when you have people there who see that everything is working just fine," he said.

"It's definitely an issue," said Doug Chapin, a national-elections expert who is director of the Program for Excellence in Election Administration at the University of Minnesota. "Any time you have crowds of non-voters at the polling place it's a potential problem.

"The 'observers' likely won't be an issue unless their need to figure out who's voting creates problems. It's the watchers that pose the biggest potential disruption, given both the need to resolve challenges as well as deal with the confusion (and anger) that will probably result."

The Romney campaign is signing up "talented volunteers" through midnight tonight for a task force operating in "key states across the country." But it's not just people at the polls; the campaign is seeking workers to staff phone banks to contact potential supporters who have not voted and others to give them a ride to the polls if needed.

"It takes a huge number of volunteers to do this," said Scott Jennings, Romney's campaign director in Ohio. "But, fortunately, we have seen a massive influx of volunteers into this campaign, so we've got the bodies to pull it off."

He would not specify how many or which of Ohio's 10,000-plus precincts would be targeted by the Romney campaign, calling that information "proprietary." But he readily acknowledged that the stepped-up effort is a sign of how close - and competitive - this year's contest is in Ohio.

It used to be a sign of a campaign's commitment when workers would go over the lists of voters who have and have not voted, posted twice on Election Day. This year, however, the Romney campaign wants that information in real time.

"Look, it's a close race, and you need to take advantage of every moment you have," Jennings said. "We just don't want to waste any time that day, and we don't want to miss one last opportunity to get any of our voters to the polls. ... It's not as much (about) who's voted but who hasn't voted."

Chris Maloney, the Romney campaign's Ohio spokesman, said, "We've been preparing for this Election Day window for weeks. We've been working on it since the first week we got on the ground."

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, who is helping to recruit the necessary volunteers, said the effort is not designed to combat voter fraud.

But Jennings acknowledged that "if a poll observer is at the polls and they witness something they think is amiss or somebody runs out of ballots ... it's within their rights to pick up the phone and tell us about it."

The Obama campaign's presence at polling places is concentrated on protecting voters' rights.

"The idea behind this is just to make sure that everybody just has the access they deserve at the polls to get in, get out and get on with their day," said Jessica Kershaw, the president's campaign spokeswoman in Ohio. "Many of our volunteers are lawyers but this is not a requirement."

Unlike the digitized approach of the Romney campaign, the Obama team's main Election Day turnout effort will consist of knocking on the doors of their likely supporters to make sure they vote, she said.

The Columbus-based Ohio Unity Coalition, an affiliate of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, is trying to recruit people around Ohio, including about 120 in the Columbus area, to observe outside polling locations and help voters who need assistance.

"We also want to make sure there is not intimidation or misinformation going on as people are trying to vote," said Deidra Reese, coordinator of the Ohio coalition. "We really just want to counterbalance with the truth."

Under Ohio law, the only way Houston-based True The Vote could get its anti-fraud observers into Buckeye State polling places was through the sponsorship of either a party or a group of at least five candidates. The latter route was provided by six Franklin County candidates, all but one a Republican: Recorder Daphne Hawk, Engineer Dean Ringle, Coroner Jan Gorniak, sheriff candidate Michael Herrill, Common Pleas Court judge candidate Terri Jamison and Scott Rupert, an independent for U.S. Senate.

While Ockerman said he has seen drives to beef up polling-place observers, he has never witnessed an effort like the one in Hamilton County, where the Voter Integrity Project, which is affiliated with True The Vote, is trying to train the official poll workers. The tea party-affiliated group has tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to get officials in 14 Ohio counties to remove people from voter-registration rolls.

"You've got to make sure people are trained correctly. Obviously, if there are outside groups doing that, we have no quality control," Ockerman said.

He said he is "dubious" of the training effort, a portion of which says: "We want to show you what your secretary of state might not show you" and focus on ways to detect voter fraud.

"It makes me wonder if they're over-emphasizing things that a political party may like about the law and de-emphasizing other things," Ockerman said.